'The aim is to weaken the West': The inside story of how Russian propagandists are waging war on Europe

Russian
President Vladimir Putin talks with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel in 2014.REUTERS/Kevin
Lamarque

A Russian-born 13-year-old girl, known only as Lisa F, claimed in
January last year that she was kidnapped and raped by three
refugees while living in Berlin.

The story provoked a huge response on social media. Russian news
outlets ran with the news before the police could complete
their investigation. It also sparked protests in Berlin, where
campaigners condemned Angela Merkel's refugee policy.

The story went so far that Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei
Lavrov, accused the German government of trying to cover it up
and of "sweeping
problems under the rug." In return, Berlin warned Russia not
to exploit the case for propaganda.

Just days after the report, Berlin police concluded their
investigation and said the girl had spent the 30 hours in which
she was reportedly kidnapped with people she knew — and that a
medical examination had shown she had not been raped. They did
open an investigation into two suspects.

This did not stop Russian media from warning repeatedly over
migrants raping women and children in Europe. Most worryingly,
many German Russians still refused to believe the German police
or government after the story was disproved.

The so-called "Lisa-case" is one of thousands of online stories
linking refugees in Europe to criminal activity, including rape,
assaults, and robberies. Fuel is thrown on these embers by groups
on social media and blogs. Behind it all is what politicians and
experts are calling a growing Russian propaganda campaign aimed
at destabilising Europe.

An EU official with knowledge of the matter, who asked to remain
anonymous due to the sensitive nature of his work, talked to
Business Insider about the disinformation campaign emanating from
the Kremlin. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to our
request for comment over email.

The Lisa-case shows how the disinformation works from the bottom
up, the EU official explained. In this case, a local story
garnered so much attention on social media, that it was picked up
by Russian state media and eventually relayed to the top people
in the Russian administration, creating a diplomatic spat.

It’s not only the traditional media, it’s also the fringe
media, it’s also the trolls, it’s also the NGOs ...

The Russian state-controlled media is only one of the many ways
the pro-Kremlin messages are spread though. The media sources
used in Europe for Russia's disinformation campaign are numerous
and depend on the country.

In the Baltic states, where there is a large number of Russian
speakers, many already watch and read normal Russian state TV and
news sites.

In the rest of Europe, our source explains, the propaganda comes
from "strange websites" that try and convince the readers that
the mainstream media is lying to them. And although their
readership is quite small, they are large in number and have a
lot of social media engagement.

The EU official also added that their network was so wide-ranging
that to keep track of every single outlet is impossible. The
source described the scale of the propaganda:

"Unfortunately we do not really have a complete overview of all
the channels they use, because really we are talking about
thousands and thousands in dozens of languages. It’s not only the
traditional media, it’s also the fringe media, it’s also the
trolls, it’s also the NGOs, it’s also the diplomats who spread
pro-Kremlin information. It’s simply too many channels. It’s
quite hard to describe all the things. I’m not sure anyone in the
world has a complete overview of it."

Angela Merkel is 'enemy number one' for Russian propagandists

For months now, experts on Russian propaganda in Europe have
sounded the alarm bell on the country's increasingly numerous and
perfidious attempts to manipulate public opinion.

Both NATO and the European Union have in the recent years set up
task forces to try and deal with the growing threat but our
source says it's not enough, and that the Russian disinformation
campaign urgently needs to become part of the everyday public
debate.

And it's not just experts, high-ranking government officials in
Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Czech Republic have also issued
stark warnings. In November, Bruno Kahl, the head of Germany’s
foreign intelligence service, said that the German elections
could be targeted by Russian hackers focused on spreading
misinformation.

"We have evidence that cyber-attacks are taking place that have
no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty,"
Kahl told Süddeutsche Zeitung. "The perpetrators are
interested in delegitimising the democratic process as such,
regardless of who that ends up helping. We have indications that
[the attacks] come from the Russian region."

The East StratCom Task
Force, set up by the EU in 2015 to combat Russian
disinformation, said over the past 15 months it has found "more
than 2,500 examples in 18 languages of stories contradicting
publicly available facts, multiplied in many languages and
repeated on a daily basis."

Merkel
and Putin in 2012.REUTERS/Maxim
Shemetov

The East StratCom Task Force also found that the German
Chancellor had come under increasing attacks last year and warned
that she would face an even broader campaign ahead of the federal
elections in Germany later this year.

"It is becoming quite obvious that she is now the target number
one for them... the enemy number one is definitely Angela
Merkel," our EU source confirmed. "She stands for everything that
the Kremlin stands against, co-operation of the EU, and
cooperation of the EU with the US, so yes she’s the strongest
enemy they have at the moment in the West."

The Russian intelligence services are looking for weaknesses that
would make countries vulnerable to manipulation. Those weaknesses
can be tensions in the political landscape, populist, far-right
or Eurosceptic parties, resurging historic social divisions, or
deep dissatisfaction within parts of the population not being
addressed by the government.

The refugee crisis in Germany became a pressure point for the
Kremlin as Germans became increasingly resentful of hundreds of
thousands of refugees arriving in the country over the course of
a few months. Other issues exploited by propagandists are the
Ukraine conflict, NATO, and the war in Syria.

A
woman holds a picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as
migrants set off on foot for the border with Austria from
Budapest, Hungary, September 4, 2015.REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

But immigration is the key focus. "The refugee crisis is probably
the most exploited [theme] in the European member states because
it proves to be the most divisive thing. They are always looking
for divisions. When you create more divisions then you actually
weaken the enemy," our EU source said.

Rise of populism is helping Russia's 'war with the West'

The biggest refugee crisis in Europe since WW2 has been
accompanied by a spike in support for populist parties all over
the continent. Considering most of those populist parties are
deeply Eurosceptic, their rise to power would prove a windfall
for Russia's aim to destabilise the EU.

In March, the head of the anti-immigration Party for Freedom,
Geert Wilders, who
was condemned for discrimination last December, stands a
chance of getting into power in the Netherlands. In May, France
will elect a new president and, although polls are still showing
the head of the far-right Front National party Marine Le Pen as
losing in the second round of the elections, her poll numbers
keep rising.

Finally, although Germany's federal election in September is seen
as one of the most important one in years, the risk of a
far-right party coming into power is very low. But, the public
opinion on Merkel's refugee policy has turned increasingly
negative and the huge amount of fake or partially fake news
blaming refugees for various crimes might be at least partly
responsible.

French
far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen, second
right, poses for photographers with Dutch far-right Freedom Party
leader Geert Wilders, right, Austria's Secretary General of the
Freedom Party Harald Vilimsky, second left, and Federal Secretary
of Italy's Northern League Matteo Salvini after a meeting of EU
far-right parties at the European Parliament in Brussels, in
2014.AP Photo/Geert Vanden
Wijngaert

"Obviously it is very hard to focus on direct influence but we
can also just have a look at the facts, and the facts are quite
worrying," the EU official said.

The source added that there were three referendums in the EU in
2016: The referendum on leaving the EU in Britain, the EU-Ukraine
association agreement, and the Italian constitutional referendum.
The outcome of each was not in the interests of the EU and played
into the Kremlins desire to unsettle.

No one can actually tell how much influence the Kremlin's
disinformation campaign is having on the public opinion in the
EU. What is being observed is that the Russian leadership is
actively trying, through various means and channels, to promote
certain anti-EU political forces in Europe and shape public
opinion.

Russia's strategy to "weaken the opponent," in this case Europe,
is "what became the disinformation campaign, the aim of it is to
weaken and destabilise the West, because it’s much easier to have
30 weaker opponents than one big one," our source said.

"So any event, any chance to divide and destabilise the West is
exploited. It goes hand in hand with the political aim of the
current Russian regime. They see themselves as being in a war
with the West."